Harry McCracken

Harry McCracken is an editor at large at TIME, where he writes about personal technology for the magazine and TIME.com. He’s been a gadget nerd since the late 1970s and is the founder of Technologizer and the former editor in chief at PC World magazine. He's talked tech on everything from the History Channel to Dateline NBC to NPR's Science Friday. Contact him at harry_mccracken@timemagazine.com.

Articles from Contributor

For years, it’s been fashionable to complain that Windows comes in too many versions, resulting in unneccesary complexity and confusion. Here’s a 2003 Cnet story by Joe Wilcox which reports on controversy over Windows XP’s …

Thirty-five years ago, on April 16 and 17, 1977, more than twelve thousand proto-geeks flooded into San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium. They were there to attend a new event called the West Coast Computer Faire, and the room …

You probably weren’t paying attention when a tiny company called Apple Computer introduced its second product, the Apple II microcomputer, at the West Coast Computer Faire on April 16 and 17, 1977. (I wasn’t.) You may never have …

More than most technologies I can think of, the E Ink screens used in monochrome e-readers such as Barnes & Noble’s Nook Simple Touch and Amazon.com’s Kindle Touch present a stark set of tradeoffs. If you don’t mind the lack of …

From Quickoffice to Documents to Go to Apple’s own iWork programs, there’s no shortage of iPad apps that let you view and edit Microsoft Office documents. But as anyone who relies on Office to do real work can tell you, there are …

Before the dawn of Facebook, the notion of organizing information into never-ending feeds of terse status updates would have sounded like gobbledegook. But Facebook proves that when it comes to keeping track of your friends’ …

In their never-ending, so-far-unsuccessful quest to give the iPad a run for its money, makers of Android tablets have produced models in a dizzying array of sizes. It doesn’t seem to be helping, and the novelty is wearing off. …

The PC industry is so young that a remarkable percentage of its most significant figures are still with us. But it lost a key one on Sunday when Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore, died at 83. Commodore was one of the first …

I have a gazillion boxes of various sorts connected to the two TVs in our household, but the longest-serving one is my TiVo DVR. I got it when I moved into my present home and signed up for Comcast cable TV — and I still …

In 2008, Polaroid discontinued a product that seemed to be pretty much obsolete in the digital age: instant film. Except that it wasn’t obsolete at all. A lot of people still liked taking Polaroid photos and found things in the …